‘Transnational film, transnational memory? Collective remembrance in recent pan-asian war films’

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the conflict over memory in East Asia by analyzing three pan-Asian film productions that attempt to produce a shared transnational memory of World War II: Purple Sunset (China, 2001), Distant Bonds (Japan, 2009), and My Way (South Korea, 2011). Using Hjort’s taxonomy of transnational cinemas (2009), it argues that all three productions appeal to pan-Asian transnational memory through affinitive transnationalism (transnational memory based on shared cultural heritage), but their overall transnational strategies diverge into cosmopolitan, modernizing, and globalizing transnationalism. Each strategy works to varying success for domestic and international audiences, suggesting that the cultural production of transnational memory remains elusive in the East Asian context. This paper ends with the question of whether cohesive transnational war memory is possible in East Asian cinema, and more broadly, how a stronger trend of pan-Asian transnational filmmaking might emerge outside of contested topics like World War II.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational cinema
• transnational memory
• war memory
• war film
• East Asia
• world war ii

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Go, or Weiqi in Mandarin, is a strategic board game invented in China and popular across East Asia.

2. As we will discuss below, these two strategies might also be called ‘affinitive transnationalism’ and ‘modernizing transnationalism.’ See: Hjort.

3. The ‘memory wars’ in East Asia have been well documented. Emerging in large part from conflicts over revisionist Japanese textbooks in the early 1980s and Japan’s wartime sexual slavery system, regional tensions have been exacerbated by economic uncertainty and the resurgence of nationalism across East Asia.

4. For more on Yamasaki’s writing process and the reception of Son of the Good Earth, see Li; Nogami and Zhu.

5. Interestingly, Ōnishi’s representation also marks a departure from typical Chinese images of violent Japanese soldiers. He is portrayed as a wide-eyed child pulled off to war who dies a violent and pointless death as a tokkōtai (kamikaze pilot) who is murdered by a compatriot. This narrative – of an evil Japanese imperialist engine forcing good Japanese people to comply – is ironically very much in line with popular Japanese war memory discourse (the ‘victim narrative’), seen in films such as I Want to Be a Shellfish (Japan, 2008).

6. For more historical background on Japanese returnees, see: Itoh (2010). For more on the divergent repatriation experiences of children and adult women, see: Miyatake.

7. By ‘Kor-Asian movie,’ Lee refers to the diverse participation of Korean companies, actors, and producers in transnational Asian film productions. For instance, Korean production and VFX companies are often involved in many big-budget pan-Chinese films and many Korean films are co-produced with Hong Kong companies or adapted from Japanese content (Lee 83).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Weiss

Biographical Note: Amanda Weiss is assistant professor of Japanese at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses on Japanese media and society. Her current book project, Han Heroes and Yamato Warriors: Competing Masculinities in East Asian War Cinema, explores contemporary East Asian remembrance of WWII.